Episode 3 – Social Media

Hello everybody and welcome to the Running Web3 podcast where we talk about running a web3 or crypto business. I’m your host Paul Lambert, and today we’re talking about using social media for web3 companies.

So to start, I wanna break this into two different categories of social media companies. We have traditional social media and the “newer social media”. So the traditional ones are ones that web2 companies have come to rely on and they’re more old school, if you will. These are going to include Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. The newer ones are ones that are a bit more recent and being used a little bit more often in marketing for web3, although we’ll see in just a minute that there’s a lot of overlap between those in terms of what’s being used. So these new ones are Instagram, Telegram, Discord, and the social media sites that are hosted on web3 platforms – as opposed to the web2 that we’ve seen from all the previous examples. Now I’m going to break these further into the best and the worst ones, and these are based on my experience and the experience of those that I’ve talked to.

There’s definitely some room for argument on several of these and uh, room for discussion on why they might be better or worse depending on the current conditions of today. For instance, Twitter has changed a little bit over the past couple of weeks with the change to Elon Musk in management, but we’ll take a look at them as best we can neutrally for today’s conditions. So let’s start with the best. To top the best list we have Telegram. Telegram is a discussion platform and it is very, very widely used for certainly all new crypto projects and smaller companies and then some larger companies use it. It’s very popular because there is a high degree of anonymity, meaning that people are able to join and create accounts without having to reveal any part of themselves really. So, the way the Telegram works is there will be either a channel or a group.

A channel is a way for just the company to provide announcements and updates to everybody that is subscribed to that channel, meaning that they’re able to see and maybe react to the messages, but usually they can’t post anything. All they can do is passively consume whatever announcements and updates are made. The much more popular version and the one that people think of when they think of Telegram is a group. In this group you’ll have the moderators and the team that created the group itself from the company, and then you’ll also have all of the users on there and everybody’s able to post. Oftentimes there’s some sort of verification to get into the group initially. So you’ll join prove human through some sort of of Capcha and then you’re able to post, and this is incredibly popular because it gives a way for all of the token holders in the case of crypto or customers in the case of something like education or just any community member to engage directly with other people in the community as well as with the project itself.

That being said, there are a couple of problems with it. The biggest one is definitely the scammers and spammers. On Telegram there are a ridiculous number of people that will come in both to the group itself and into your DMs and try to either sell you something that is not a high quality product or a product that doesn’t exist or they’ll spam a whole bunch of stuff. Anybody that’s a part of any web3 group on Telegram I’m sure has seen people come in and just start spamming all sorts of messages, usually about some other group. So they might come into your group and start advertising for a group that they are a part of or a group that they own or whatever the case may be. So it’s going to be very important if you’re using Telegram to have a good moderation team as well as bots set up.

So one of the other strengths of Telegram is these bots that you can set up to do certain tasks for you. Tasks like removing people that post a certain number of times in a row or that kick somebody out if they say a certain word, words that you don’t want said in your public discussion forum, or anything similar to that. The two most popular bots that I can think of off the top of my head are Rose and Combot. Both of these are incredibly popular and provide a a variety of different things, including greeting people when they come in and the other two that I just mentioned.

Next, let’s look at Twitter. So Twitter is great because it’s an easy place to find projects. Some companies will post or some group will post, and then a lot of the time you’ll see the replies to that post from a ton of people in different communities advertising their coin or talking about their token or talking about some update on a project that they saw or something like that.

So it’s a very easy way to find a large number of different groups. Now, those groups are not always the highest quality. It’s gonna depend. You have to filter through ’em just like you would any other place that you find new projects, but it is a very easy way to find them. But one of the main strengths of Twitter is the ability to passively consume and it makes it very easy to get these updates without having to worry about the other parts. So on Telegram, if I’m part of a group and the project posts something, they can pin it, which makes it a little bit easier to find, but the message that they post is going to be a little bit harder to find amid the sea of other people posting in there. The other people that are commenting in this group with Twitter, it’s a lot easier because you can just go to that Twitter account and you can look through their tweets and keep up with the news. So Twitter is a great place for people to just get updates without having to sift through the barrage of comments that you might have in a place like Telegram.

Next we have Discord, and I wanna be honest with you guys, I am definitely more biased towards Discord. I prefer it over Telegram and we’re gonna talk about that in just a minute. But Discord is sort of an alternative to Telegram. It is a discussion platform just like Telegram is, and it has a lot of the same features, but it also has a couple of improvements that we’re going to go over. So first, some of the downsides of Discord from a user perspective. One of the great draws of Telegram is that anonymity, it’s very easy to make an account and to immediately start posting, and for that to be the entire verification process. The verification process is essentially nonexistent On Discord, there are varying degrees of verification required depending on the server that you’re joining. And so it can be a little bit more of a barrier to entry, which can be off-putting for people that are trying to join, but it can be great for the project because you can guarantee that you’re not going to get as many people coming in and like spamming or doing things that you don’t want them to because it’s a little bit harder for them to join.

Now, the reason that I like Discord is that it has a better layout and better formatting in my opinion. So whereas on Telegram it’s one discussion forum and everybody’s posting into the same channel, the same group in Discord, you have one server that people will join, and then within that server you have different server channels. So you might have a channel for announcements where only the project members, and the the core people that work at the company are able to post, but everybody’s able to view. Then you might have a general discussion channel where everybody can post, and then you might have a getting help channel where your customers can go and people can post in there to get help from the team. And then you might have an FAQ page where only the team is able to post or where they set it once and then forget it and occasionally update it if needed.

So there’s a lot of different options that the team can use to restrict different areas to only have information relevant to that area. If people want FAQs, they can go directly to that channel instead of having to go to the main discussion channel and scroll and scroll and hope that they happen to stumble upon it. One other common thing that a lot of people do on Discord for web3 is that they will have different channels for different languages. So you might have an English only discussion channel and then a Spanish only discussion channel and then a Chinese only discussion channel. And each of these are under the same server, so people can easily swap between them. They don’t have to go join another one, it’s just there and they can mute notifications from any channel that they don’t wanna be paying attention to. If there’s a language that I don’t speak, I can just mute all the notifications from that channel and still receive notifications from the channels I care about all within that server.

Discord also has a lot of pre-made bots that are able to do the same things that we talked about in Telegram – able to greet people when they come in, able to remove users that are spamming messages, able to warn users if they’re using caps too often, all sorts of things. However, Discord also has bots that I have not yet seen on Telegram. Because of the way that Discord is laid out, things like a price tracker. So a lot of crypto projects on Discord will have a live price tracker that shows up in the top left corner of the Discord server that tells you here is the current price and it’s able to find those because of the way that you’re able to code Discord bots. There’s a lot of customization that you can do and I think it’s just an improved version of Telegram essentially.

Next, let’s talk about Reddit. Reddit is a good place for finding projects and a little bit for discussing. So on Reddit there’s all sorts of different subreddits and within those subreddits there’s different discussions. For instance, you might have a subreddit dedicated to a particular company or project where people can discuss that company or project on there with other users in there and with the core team of that project and so on. But there will also be subreddits for one example that comes to mind is CryptoMoonshot, which is a subreddit dedicated to finding tokens that are launching that are supposed to go to the moon. And so there are different formats that people use in there to lay out the information that is expected in each of the posts and then people can discuss that token or that coin or that project on the particular post inside of Crypto Moonshot. There are hundreds and hundreds of these groups – there’s groups for everything imaginable, for all different chains, for all different areas of web3, and it’s very easy to go and find the group that you are interested in and participate in the discussion there.

Now Reddit is a little bit famous for not necessarily having the highest quality of discussion, but that’s going to be the case in pretty much any social media that you find. There’s always going to be some people posting in a way that you don’t want or commenting in a way that you don’t like. So that’s just unfortunately how it is.

Now that we’ve gone through all the best, let’s take a look at, in my opinion, the worst two. Firstly, Instagram. Now to say this is the worst feels a little bit misleading, I would categorize it as sub-optimal. Maybe Instagram is not good for smaller projects from what I have seen. However, it is great for larger events. So these larger conferences and events, things like Decentral and Consensus have used Instagram incredibly well. They have a big following on there. They have constant engagement, but smaller projects, smaller groups often can struggle to find a way to use it effectively.

That’s not to say that they all do. I’ve seen several examples. For instance, there’s a educator in web3. They constantly post stories and posts on there with good information that people react to very positively. But Instagram tends to work better for these larger conferences and events because it’s great at showing little snippets of everyday life. So in these conferences and events, they’re able to post highlights from that conference or from the previous year they’re able to post promotional videos, things like that, that maybe don’t exist quite as much with these smaller companies. There is a lot of room for growth here, and I think that the number of projects that are using it is slowly going up, but in its current form, it tends to work better for these larger conferences and events.

Now, in my opinion, TikTok is the worst social media platform that there is for web3 companies, and that’s because it had a really big image problem with a lot of scammers on there. Over the past year and a half/two years, people started associating any crypto project that they see on TikTok with a scam and nobody wants to have their project associated with a scam. And so a lot of people exited from TikTok and the only ones that remained were these scammers. However, that has changed a little bit and in fact Danielle Lukins on LinkedIn had a great write up for this and I’ll be linking it in the additional resources/show notes for this episode. But the, the summary of it is that TikTok has great search engine optimization and is slowly working its way up to being not necessarily the default search engine, but a place for people to discover things and having your project on there and being able to gain that traction is very powerful and pretty important.

The other thing that it does is gives really good organic growth opportunity, and this is because TikTok recommends based on your interests. And so if somebody is interested in education and web3 for instance, TikTok is more likely to recommend a crypto account that it’s advertising to them because they’re interested in web3 things. If somebody’s looking at industrial applications of blockchain, it’s more likely to recommend education in web3 to talk about how all these new applications are coming out and the different ways that these blockchain protocols can be used to improve manufacturing or improve safety or improve logistics. Danielle also points out that TikTok has updated their ad policy to better deal with these companies that were negatively impacting the image of TikTok and of web3 on TikTok. So with all these changes, it’s probably worth taking a look at TikTok again and checking to see if it’s worth it for you to advertise on there because they’ve made a lot of changes recently to dramatically improve the benefits of joining the platform and advertising on there as a Web three company.

Lastly, we’ll quickly run through the three remaining groups. First, Facebook. Facebook is a platform that has great advertising opportunity. They have an incredibly robust advertising platform and make it very easy for people to hop on there and advertise and target exactly who they want to. However, the demographic of Facebook is often not the same demographic that people want to be advertising to as a web3 company. The number of people that are on there that fit those descriptions and those target customers has dramatically decreased in the time that web3 has started coming to maturity. And so Facebook is not quite as popular as some of these other social media platforms. That being said, there are still a lot of people on Facebook and a lot of web3 companies have a Facebook page that they can at least have people join, become a a part of and post comments and things like that.

Next, we have YouTube. And YouTube has a couple of different ways of being used. Firstly, it’s a great way for projects and for web3 companies to be able to post information whether that is an AMA that they had or educational content on how to use their product or anything like that. It’s a great place to host that information. For advertising, things work a little bit differently. YouTube is owned by Google and Google has restrictions on what types of projects or what types of companies are able to advertise through their platform. They have a lot of restrictions, especially surrounding crypto, and a lot of the restrictions are a little bit vague for things that aren’t crypto, but that are web3. So it’s definitely worth looking into and making sure that you are consistent with their restrictions and with their guidelines if you’re planning on advertising through YouTube.

Also, a lot of the people that might be the target audience for this are going to have ad block installed in some way or another, some form of ad block, so your ads might not reach them quite the way that you want them to. That being said, there are other ways of advertising on YouTube and it’s fairly common to see people with sponsored videos. So people that do crypto reviews for instance, or that are talking about particular applications of web3 and blockchain technology will often be sponsored by a company or by a project in web3. And this is a great way to improve brand recognition for your company. There are also these coin reviews themselves where you could be part of that video and the number of channels that are successful with this type of content have increased over the past couple of years. So YouTube definitely is a good avenue for people to go. You just have to be careful with the way that you are engaging with the platform as a company.

Now for our last group, we have web3 social media sites. So these are social media sites that were developed on web3 platforms and exist on the internet, but that you would be using web3 interactions to get to. You might log in with a wallet instead of with a username and password. I’m going to have to do a whole separate episode on this because there’s a lot of variation and a lot of complexity in how these sites can be used and what they’re used for. So look out for that episode in the future.

But that’s all we have for this episode. So thank you so much for listening. I’ll be sure to include a quick summary in the description as well as my transcript and additional resources on my website. You can find me on any podcasting platform as well as my website, www.runningweb3.com, as well as my Twitter and Instagram, which are both @RunningWeb3. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you in the next episode.